


A Cabin in the Woods

by osprey_archer



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gaslighting, Gen, Historical References, Loneliness, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 23:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15012062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: Soon after the battle of New York, SHIELD sends Steve to an isolated cabin to decompress.It doesn't seem like a terrible idea till Steve starts seeing Bucky.





	A Cabin in the Woods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [razzleydazzley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/razzleydazzley/gifts).



> In _Agents of SHIELD_ episode 2.15, they mention briefly that SHIELD sent Steve to an isolated cabin in the woods soon after he defrosted. "Why the hell would they do that?" I thought, and this is the story that eventually bloomed from that thought.

They send Steve to the cabin in the woods because they want him to stop embarrassing them.

They don’t put it exactly like that, of course. “It’s a chance to get away from the world,” explains Penelope. She’s Steve’s minder. He suspects that SHIELD picked her because she is a very twenty-first century SHIELD agent. She is a woman and Asian-American (that, she explains, is the polite term these days, not Oriental. Steve writes this carefully in his little book) and carries a cell phone with a rainbow heart charm. Her patience is nearly inexhaustible. Steve is fairly sure he exhausts it by the end. 

“To learn about the twenty-first century at your own pace,” Penelope continues to explain. “You can relax in nature and decompress.”

“That’s what I was supposed to do on my road trip,” Steve says irritably. 

Get out of New York City, he thought. Get away from reporters, lose himself on the back roads, acquaint himself with this strange new place that is his country without the prying eyes of the press on him at all times. 

He had not realized that these days _everyone_ is the press. Supermarket clerks use their phones to film themselves asking him how he’s finding the twenty-first century. A group of teenagers with numerous piercings ask him what he thinks of their tattoos, and are clearly disappointed when he doesn’t have vapors on the spot. (He thinks they are hideous, but he figures that fashion is like that a lot of the time: hideous. Look at those eighteenth-century wigs with ships on top.) A middle-aged blonde waitress asks what he thinks (leaning forward, confidingly) about a _black man_ being in charge of SHIELD.

That one’s easy. Steve knows racial prejudice when he sees it. He says he think it’s wonderful, and represses every bitter thought he’s ever had about Fury. 

After all, a white director would have authorized the Tesseract experiments just the same. _Anyone_ would have authorized the Tesseract experiments. That’s why Steve refused to give Peggy his coordinates when he brought Red Skull’s plane down: he knew the Allies would start experimenting the moment they got their hands on the Tesseract. 

He has Peggy’s number. He thinks about calling her. He sits all alone in a neat little motel room and stares at the phone. She founded SHIELD. SHIELD decided to weaponize the Tesseract. Just like Hydra. 

He does not call her. He checks out of the motel at first light, without sleeping, and drives on. 

He stops at a Starbucks for coffee to keep him going. A brawny man demands Captain American’s opinion about the Vietnam War. Steve – already rattled by the incomprehensible menu – blurts, “What’s Vietnam?” 

People play that clip for him for weeks afterward. Steve smiles politely as he watches himself look like an idiot over and over again. 

That’s what prompts SHIELD to send Penelope after him. They’re tired of watching Steve look like a moron on Youtube and hope she will make him less of a disaster. “You probably know Vietnam as French Indochina,” Penelope explains. 

Steve has heard of French Indochina. Barely. It’s on the other side of the globe and he cannot imagine why his isolationist nation which had to be dragged kicking and screaming into World War II would go to war there. “What did French Indochina ever do to us?” 

“Well, after China fell to the communists…” Penelope begins.

“China fell to the communists?” Steve bleats. 

“In 1949.” 

That explains why people keep waving objects with _Made in China_ stickers under his nose like that ought to make him mad. “So,” Steve says cautiously, “that means China’s not our ally anymore?”

Which launches Penelope into an explanation of the current geopolitical situation, during which it transpires that Israel exists as a modern-day country and not just a place in the Bible, and then Penelope has to explain about the Holocaust. “But how could that happen?” Steve asks, appalled, because how could even the _Nazis_ – and then they spend the rest of the afternoon discussing the Holocaust and the nature of human evil and somehow they never do get back to Vietnam.

The straw that breaks the camel’s back comes when some punk kid asks Steve if he and Bucky were fucking, and Steve lifts him up by the collar and shoves him against the wall and snarls in his face, “Don’t you dare insult Bucky Barnes.” 

If _anyone_ had made an accusation like that in the forties, they would have been asking for a punch in the nose. They would have meant to destroy Bucky’s reputation forever just by asking the question, and Steve’s too, and the only defense in a situation like that is a good offense, _especially_ if the accusation is true. 

Steve attempts to explain this to Penelope (except for the last part), while Penelope attempts to explain to Steve about the gay rights movement, and soon they are both shouting at each other, until Steve realizes that he is shouting at a woman and shuts up and Penelope finishes with “ – homophobic asshole!” 

They glare at each other, panting. “He knew what he was doing,” Steve insists. 

Penelope flings up her hands. “He had a rainbow flag pin on his backpack!” she cries, and when Steve doesn’t get it, she shouts, “ _He’s_ probably gay! He was hoping you would be a positive role model!” 

At which point Steve’s brain simply overloads. He leans against the cinderblock wall and slides down to sit on the gritty tarmac in the alleyway. He remembers the rainbow heart on her phone. He has disappointed her personally, he can see, she was hoping that he and Bucky – “ _You_ don’t think…” 

“No,” she says. She sounds tired. “You’re from the forties,” she says, more to herself than him. “What did I expect?” 

_Oh, we did everything in the forties_ , Steve thinks. But a lifetime of silence makes it impossible to say. 

The wall-slamming video goes viral. That’s when Director Fury suggests the cabin. 

Penelope does not go with him. It’s just Steve and the lake and the woods. There are deliveries of food and books every three days (they encourage him to try electronic books, but it’s just too weird). He has a daily check-in call, too. It is a blow when he discovers that he is not talking with Penelope, either. “Is she mad at me?” he asks, on the second day.

“Of course not,” his new minder reassures him. He is bland and hearty with a salesman’s plastically handsome face. Steve thinks his name is Chris. 

“Could you tell her,” Steve begins. But he loses his nerve. He has realized, belatedly, that it would have raised him in her esteem if he had confessed that he and Bucky – 

Maybe if he were talking directly to Penelope he could say it. But he cannot tell this bland smiling man anything. “Tell her I’m sorry?” he finishes. “I know I put her in a difficult position. I just wanted to protect Bucky…” His voice falters. “I thought this time at least I could protect him.” 

***

Steve’s a city boy. There’s not much for him to do at a cabin in the middle of nowhere. He’s never learned to hunt or fish. He takes out the canoe, and figures out how to paddle himself around the lake. It might be fun if he had someone to splash with his paddle. Ever since he’s joined the army he’s been used to eating and sleeping and, hell, even shitting next to about twenty other guys. It feels weird to be all by himself. 

“I was thinking,” Steve says to Chris. Chris is smiling. “Maybe I should take Tony up on his invitation.” 

Chris’s smile flickers. Steve is reminded somehow of the ripples spreading across a still pond after you toss a pebble in. “You want to go to Stark Tower?”

“Well, his other house, I guess. Stark Tower is still under construction, right?” Or is it? Who knows how fast they can fix damage like that in the twenty-first century?

Chris’s face has returned to its usual limpid serenity. “We think it’s a good idea that you stay out of the public eye for a while,” Chris says. “With the things people are saying online…”

He dangles this like bait for a fish. Steve bites. “What are they saying online?”

“Oh, never mind,” Chris says. “Just try to enjoy your vacation. When did you last get a real rest?” 

Steve hunts and pecks his way to the “were you and Bucky fucking?” video. There are, he discovers for the first time, comments below. Half are from horrible people who think Steve should have beat the kid up worse. The other half think Steve is a horrible person. 

His neck prickles. His ears prick. He is not just alone – alone in the middle of God knows where – but alone in the world, really alone. The people he hates like him and the people he likes despise him. 

He has the sudden unbearable sensation that someone is standing behind him. He spins his chair around, but there is no one there. He has the desk at his back, and the wall behind that, and no one _could_ be standing behind him, but he can still feel them there, just waiting to grab his neck. 

***

That night is the first time he sees Bucky. He is cleaning off his frying pan (he made himself eggs for dinner). He keeps glancing over his shoulder (the feeling of someone at his neck has not gone away), glancing out the window, checking his perimeter, and on one of those swift sidelong glances out the window he sees – 

Well, Bucky. That’s what he thinks, anyway. Just for an instant, out among the trees, and then Steve's running out the door with his sudsy frying pan in hand yelling, “Bucky! Bucky!” 

But there’s no one there when he reaches the trees. No footprints. There might be a trail to follow if he knew how to read it (Steve eyes the underbrush as if he might spontaneously develop the ability to interpret a snapped twig), but he’s a city boy and he has no idea. Dum Dum always took care of that sort of thing. Steve’s frying pan drips soapsuds onto the dead leaves. His heart thuds. 

It must’ve been a trick of the light. 

But he sees him again the next morning, very early. (Steve got into the habit of rising early, very early, as a newspaper boy.) He is standing at the edge of the woods again, or so it seems, and again Steve plunges out of the house – this time he is not yelling – and again there’s no one there, and no sign of anyone crashing away into the woods. 

The worst is the time that he’s sleeping on the floor (he can no longer sleep in his bed; it feels unstable somehow, like the springy mattress might buck him off) and wakes up, and there is Bucky at the window, looking in. His face is so clear in the moonlight, clear and angry, his pale face floating in a sea of black. Steve is on his feet in an instant, across the room in an instant more, and he puts his hand through the window to snatch at the face in the glass.

No one is there. He is left with nothing but a bloody hand. 

Bucky is haunting him. Bucky is angry. Because Steve let him die. Because Steve’s attempt to protect Bucky’s good name has just made them both look like a couple of homophobic assholes. Because Steve lied… 

The kitchen begins to lighten with approaching sunrise. The smudgy gray light rouses Steve. He stands up and washes his hands (the smaller cuts from the window are already well on their way to healing) and pours himself a glass of water, which he drinks slowly, watching the sky lighten to lavender. 

Bucky’s not haunting him. That’s nonsense. Steve’s going insane. He’s got battle fatigue, somehow, weeks after his last battle. He used to sleep like a baby under gunfire and now he’s cracked under the strain of peace and quiet. 

Steve’s daily phone call is not until ten. He attempts to pull himself together and only half succeeds. 

“How are you today?” Chris asks.

Steve has to clear his throat twice before he manages, “I’m not doing too well.”

“Well, that’s great, that’s great,” Chris says heartily. 

Steve is taken aback. Then he realizes that Chris is just not listening. 

He had meant to show Chris the cuts on his hand – there are a couple of bad ones still visible – but he can’t lift it. He feels as if someone has glued it to his lap. He is alone in this world and everyone is dead and –

Except no. Not everyone. He has that telephone number. “Could I talk to Peggy?” Steve asks. “Peggy Carter.” 

“Peggy Carter?” Chris echoes. “Oh, I don’t think so. She’s in the hospital, you know.”

“She – oh,” Steve says. 

She’s going to die before he can see her again. He is instantly sure of it. 

“She’s very ill,” says Chris. “She’s much too ill to speak to you.”

“Ask her!” Steve shouts. 

“We haven’t been able to tell her about you, you know." Chris is still smiling. "The shock might kill her. We wouldn’t want that, would we?” 

Suddenly Steve feels cool and calm. Chris is an enemy. There are only two things to do with a person like that: punch him in the face or get the fuck away. 

And the computer screen makes punching impossible. So. 

“No,” Steve agrees. He flashes a smile too. “I think I’ll go for a hike this afternoon. Clear my head.” 

“Oh, great! Exercise is so good for you.” 

He’ll walk the fuck out. That’s what he’ll do. He’ll take all the food in the cabin, as much as he can ram into his pack, and he’ll walk out till he finds civilization and then he’ll hitchhike back to DC to see Peggy. Everything will be all right once he’s seen Peggy. 

And if she really is too sick to see him?

Then maybe he’ll go to Tony. Or Dum Dum; he’s alive, too, the files said. The point is, he’ll be back among people again, he won’t be alone, he won’t be _here_. 

Steve packs most of his kitchen. Not the canned goods – Steve has read his Jack London; he knows only fools take canned goods on their wilderness treks – but everything else. Nuts and crackers and dried fruit and cheese, anything that he can eat without cooking it first, really. He hard-boils the eggs in his fridge and takes them too. He finds that pallet of water bottles SHIELD sent and tucks them in every nook and cranny in his pack. 

Steve always wanted to go camping as a kid. Bucky used to brag about his camping trips when he visited his uncle in Shelbyville and Steve always scoffed (“Who wants to spend summer out in the sticks?”) but that was just because he was envious. 

Over the top of everything Steve puts in a thick wool blanket and a tarp. That’ll keep everything dry. 

Then he makes a sandwich, fills his canteen – and he’s set. Even with all the water bottles, his pack is still lighter than it was during World War II. None of that heavy ammunition. 

And even a heavy pack is no trouble for a super soldier, anyway. 

He heads out. 

Steve didn’t have much experience with forests growing up. He got plenty during the war, and he is a little worried that he will imagine snipers up every tree and flinch at every broken twig. But he feels much calmer than he expected. The forest is so different than the ones he knew in Europe. The trees are all spruce and pines, and the floor is covered in a thick springy cushion of pine needles that bounces slightly as he walks. The birds sing. The air smells delicious, like Christmas. There’s no stench of gunpowder and cordite. 

Steve whistled a few bars of “Jingle Bells.” But this is a bridge too far: he stops, his heart pounding, the hair on the back of his neck bristling, convinced that his innocent whistle has caught the attention of some sniper hidden deep within the woods, and even now the man is taking a bead…

But there is no shot, of course. There is no sniper. There is no one here with him, he tells himself, and almost believes. No other human being in these woods. Just Steve and the singing birds. 

Steve leaves the whistling to the birds after that. He walks cautiously at first, but soon enough the fear begins to fade. There is no one for miles and miles around. It is silly to creep along like this. 

Soon Steve is striding confidently forward. His ears prick occasionally, when he hears say the sound of a broken twig – but these woods are full of squirrels, raccoons, rabbits. He sees a deer track on the trail, and stops to marvel at it, just briefly. It makes him feel like a pioneer boy in a story.

Pioneer boys in stories always seemed to run into bears. Steve hasn’t got a rifle, doesn’t even have his service revolver. He hopes that SHIELD has put its cabin somewhere bear-free. 

But despite these little worries, he feels better than he has for weeks. The clear air seems to have cleared his mind. He is making good time, going downhill – he read somewhere that if you find yourself lost in the woods you should always go downhill. Go downhill till you find water, and then follow the water downstream. Water always leads to people. 

He is scanning so carefully for signs of water that he does not see – whatever he might have seen, in the air, that might have warned him about the force field. But maybe he would have seen nothing, anyway, even if he had known what to look for.

In any case, he walks right into it. One moment, he is striding confidently forward; the next, he is blasted back, his entire body rigid, as if he is a cartoon character who has just been electrocuted. 

He does not remember hitting the ground. 

***

“Can you hear me, knucklehead? Jesus _Christ_ , you just walked right into that force field.” 

Steve’s eyelids flutter. He cannot tell how long he has been out. The world seems out of focus, everything fuzzy and too bright, and the voice is at once too loud and hard to make out. 

“Well, you’re alive, at least,” the voice says. It sounds annoyed, and familiar, annoyingly familiar, especially when it says, “You moron, are you _trying_ to get yourself killed?”

“No,” Steve says. He tries to get up, but he only moves a little before he falls back, panting. It is like someone has injected him all over with Novocain – not quite enough to numb the pain, but enough to make him dull and flabby. 

“Just lie there,” the voice says. “Idiot.” And then the owner of the voice comes into view, leaning over Steve to look into his eyes, and Steve recognizes him. 

“Bucky?” Steve mumbles. But the name doesn’t come out clearly. 

He has died. That’s the only possible explanation. He has died and gone to purgatory, probably, because there’s no way he would make it straight into heaven (and if he were in heaven, then he wouldn’t be in pain), and equally no way that Bucky could have gone to hell. 

So. Purgatory. 

Purgatory seems a lot like life on earth, which makes sense, Steve supposes. He is really not in any fit state for theological speculation. 

“Bucky,” he says again, more clearly this time. 

“Your eyes are focusing,” Bucky mutters. His chin is stubbly and his hair is long. Some of Steve’s classmates in art school wore their hair that way. The queer ones who read too much Oscar Wilde. “That’s good.” 

Super. He’s in twenty-first century purgatory, where he will be purged of the sin of – what did Penelope call it? – homophobia. 

“You walked right into the force field, you dickhead,” Bucky says. “You’re lucky to be alive. Wriggle your fingers for me.”

Steve wriggles his fingers. “Force field?” he mumbles. That sounds like science fiction to him. But then he is living in the future: everything is science fiction. And then he mumbles: “Alive?” 

Bucky snorts. “Barely. Now wriggle your toes.”

Alive. 

Not purgatory after all. 

Bucky is alive, too?

“I can’t tell if you’re wriggling your toes in those fucking boots,” Bucky says. “Try your whole foot.” 

Steve swivels his foot. “Bucky,” he says weakly. 

“And why the _hell_ do you keep calling me Bucky?” 

“You are,” Steve says. But his mumble fades as he says it: he is alone and in pain and uncertain, and after all he has been hallucinating glimpses of Bucky for days. “Aren’t you?”

“Not that I know of.” 

Tears well up in Steve’s eyes. He wants to wipe them away, but he lifts his arm only a few feeble inches before it falls back against the pine needles, heavy as lead.

“Don’t cry,” the man who is not Bucky orders. “Maybe I am. I can’t remember a damn thing.” 

“You can’t?” A flutter of hope rises in Steve’s chest. 

“No.” The man who might be Bucky after all sounds annoyed. “Now shut up. I don’t think you ought to be talking.” 

“Why not?”

And suddenly Bucky – Steve’s too tired not to think of him as Bucky – cracks a grin. “’Cause it’s annoying,” he says, but fondly, so Steve doesn’t mind it. “And you oughta save your strength to get back to the cabin. Do you think you can stand?” 

“Yes,” Steve says, because this is his automatic response to anyone asking him if he can do anything. 

But it very quickly becomes clear that he cannot. He is not in pain exactly, but his body is heavy and limp, as if he has turned into a floppy rubber doll. “Well,” says Bucky, and he sounds resigned, “I guess I’ll carry you.” 

He hoists Steve up. Bucky carried him home like this a couple of times, back when Steve was a skinny little thing, after Steve had too much to drink or got in a really bad fight – it’s just the same, the way this guy cradles him, hoisted up against his shoulder so Steve’s nose is buried in his neck. 

No one has really touched him since the forties. It doesn’t seem to be a thing people do in this century. Probably because they all start accusing each other of homosexuality the minute two guys grin at each other. 

And of course it was true, about Steve and Bucky, that fucking punk kid was right. But you don’t sit back and let someone drag your best friend through the mud just because what he’s saying is _true _.__

__This guy’s skin smells just like Bucky’s – just the plain scent of skin, as if Bucky had just taken a shower, and washed off the scents of beer and cigarettes and aftershave. Steve closes his eyes and breathes in and tears leak out of his eyes again. “Bucky,” he says. Now that his eyes are closed, his eyelids are too heavy to lift. “I missed you.”_ _

__Bucky just walks on, easy, the pine needles scrunching under his boots. He lifts a hand to the juncture between Steve’s shoulder and neck and squeezes gently. “I got you,” he says. “I got you, knucklehead. It’s okay.”_ _

__***_ _

__When Steve wakes up, he is back in his bed in the cabin, looking through the window at the thick spruce tree._ _

__For the first moments after he wakes up, he is inclined to think the whole thing was a dream: all of it, possibly everything since he died on the Valkyrie. (The doctors said he didn’t really die exactly, but Steve can’t think of it any other way.)_ _

__But then he moves, and his whole body remembers that it is one big ache. He feels like he ran into a brick wall. And he did, in a way: he ran into that force field._ _

__And if the force field is real…_ _

__He gets out of bed so fast that he tips over and falls on the floor. He is still wearing yesterday’s clothes, minus his boots, and that’s just the way Bucky used to put him to bed when he was drunk, helped him get off his boots and put him on top of the quilt still fully dressed…_ _

__The cabin smells like Mrs. Barnes’ chicken soup._ _

__He is still not in full control of his body. He needs the help of the bedpost to get back to his feet, and he crosses the bedroom by staggering in between pieces of furniture: bed to chest of drawers to door, leaning against each one when he reaches it._ _

__But he is getting stronger as he moves, stronger as the smell of baking biscuits reaches him (just the kind of biscuits Mrs. Barnes used to make), and he makes it down the little hall with only a hand on the wall to help him._ _

__His heart beats against his ribs like a bird that wants to get out. He reaches the kitchen door, and peeps around to find…_ _

__…a strange man standing at his stove._ _

__“Hey, lazybones,” the strange man says. He sounds cheerful, like he has every right to be there. “Glad you’re finally up.”_ _

__Steve stands in the doorway. He is swaying slightly, and lifts a hand to the door to keep himself from falling. “Who are you?”_ _

__“Brock Rumlow.” The man opens the oven door and peaks inside. A wave of heat billows out._ _

__“How did you get here?”_ _

__Rumlow closes the oven door. For the first time, he seems to give Steve his full attention. “Don’t you remember?” he asks. “I carried you back to the cabin yesterday after you just about blew your brains out running into the force field.”_ _

__“Oh.” Steve’s voice is feeble._ _

__“You were pretty out of it.” Rumlow crosses the distance between them, puts a big hand on Steve’s shoulder and squeezes. “Kept calling me Bucky.”_ _

__Steve is the size of an ant. A crushed ant on the kitchen floor. “I’m so sorry.”_ _

__“Don’t worry about it. ‘Least you weren’t calling me Mama.” Rumlow returns to the stove. He gives the pot a stir. “You hungry? The chicken soup’s ready, and the biscuits’ll be done in just a minute or two.”_ _

__Steve feels hollow inside, but not in a way that means he has any appetite. But he is a child of the Great Depression and he can’t say no to food. “Yeah,” Steve says. His voice is slow and dragging. “I could eat.”_ _

__***_ _

__Pierce stands behind the one-way mirror, scowling at the asset through the glass. The chair has just finished its work, and the asset hangs panting from his restraints._ _

__“Do you want him prepped for another mission, sir?” the technician asks._ _

__Pierce gazes through the glass. The asset’s chest heaves. They might have neutralized Captain America entirely if the asset had followed his orders not to engage, to remain a ghost at the edges of the mark’s vision. Captain America might have had a nervous breakdown in a week. But no._ _

___He was hurt_ , the asset told Pierce, like that explained everything. _ _

__“No,” says Pierce. “He’s done more than enough for now.”_ _


End file.
